Antigua, Guatamala – God’s beauty abounds here.
We were asked last night to seek the Lord about what He might be wanting to “shake” in us, as we are in a city known for its earthquakes.
“Your view of yourself,” was His reply. He led me to Song of Solomon 4, to which I disregarded. As I read things like “you are beautiful beyond words” and “you have captured my heart, my treasure, my bride,” my response was basically “yeah whatever…blah, blah, blah!”
This morning as I began seeking the Lord as to what I needed to lose in order to gain more of Him, He once again mentioned how I see myself.
But He was not talking about the overall picture. He was asking me to look in the mirror and begin to see beauty rather than ugliness.
As the tears began to fall and the snot began to run, I realized He was asking for something that I wasn’t sure I was ready to give up yet.
Over the last several years, the Lord has talked with me often about my beauty, both inner and outer. Yet I understood this morning that I had never given Him the ugliness that I see in the mirror. There are times when I have felt physically beautiful, and I could probably recount all of them for you. But they were fleeting moments that I could never seem to recreate in my daily life.
“He has made everything beautiful in its time.” Ecclesiastes 3:11 I remember reading this as a child and hoping one day that this would be true for me. That one day I would be beautiful.
As I began to process this with my wonderful friend, Maithili, I just kept saying that I did not understand what it meant to be beautiful. In my mind, I feared believing something that may not be true. And I reasoned that I would just rather not believe it if there was any chance that I really am not beautiful.
At AIM, they often talk about us “being the church,” and this is what Maithili was for me today. She combated every lie that came out of my mouth with truth. One of her questions to me was “If you believe that God does not speak anything but Truth, how can you believe that you are ugly when He clearly says that you are beautiful?” Another one was “Do you spend more time pondering what others think about you than how God sees you?” She refused to let me continue believing the lies that I am ugly. That people see me and think of me as a “chubby girl.” That my weight disqualifies me from beauty.
Maithili was persistent and refused to let me leave our conversation without speaking the Truth. I just wanted to go do something and not deal with it at the moment, but she endured my resistance and pressed me unto I chose into the Truth.
Over dinner tonight as I was sharing this with my 5 Alive girls, I remembered that the Lord had told me last night to ask all of them to write down how they see me. I did not want to ask them because I allowed my fear to take over. But, I told them about it, and immediately they all began to tell me that beauty is just a part of who I am and what they see in me. They, as well as lots of other people in my life, often tell me how beautiful I am. But they have just been words that bounced off the ugliness that I saw in my mirror.
Thankfully, the Lord has given me a new mirror that has the word “BEAUTY” written all over it.
As I press into my Abba’s heart, I am becoming more and more like Him, even through the pain of this broken life. But it is all that I have to offer Him.
“You should clothe yourselves instead with the beauty that comes from within, the unfading beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is so precious to God.” 1 Peter 3:4
The following was from my journaling this morning:
Thanks for letting me share my brokenness with you. This was a difficult blog for me to write, but the Lord continues to remind me that He uses my brokenness for His glory. So if it is brokenness that will bring others into His heart, then my life is an open book. May I never refrain from sharing all that He has taught me, even if it makes me uncomfortable in the sharing.
